The Existential Horrors of Vibe Coding
2025-04-10
Aye Yo~ 👋🏿
When you learn software of any kind, you begin to appreciate the process of becoming familiar with a codebase. When you work at a company, it's very rare that you'll be constructing the entire codebase from scratch. You weren't there during its creation, your job is just to navigate its pathways, tracing the comments of the programmers who came before you.
You're lost at first, it's as if you've been dropped into the depths of a foggy and overgrown forest. But as you pull on the vines to see if a snake drops out of the tree or a fruit, you begin to get a knack for what you're seeing. You know where each function fits into the grand scheme of the project and when something breaks, you know every system that's related to the error and can easily track the issue down.
It's very human-like problem solving. Step by step. No stats, no complicated algorithms or deductionist principals. Just raw problem-solving.
Enter AI
I'll repeat this until it's no longer true.
AI is useful, but it is not THAT useful.
AI can do many different things, and in the hands of someone who understands what it's doing, AI can boost your productivity by quite a lot. Imagine a world where you never have to write another piece of boilerplate when you make a new file? AI did that for you. But AI cannot problem-solve. It cannot find solutions to problems that it has not been trained on. AI will repeat what it's seen before, and depending on the language you're using, that can be a good thing.
Javascript for example, runs the web. AI, no matter the company, is trained VERY well on Javascript. So well, that working with AI is like working with a Junior Dev in my experience. You have to slowly guide it to the right solutions.
However, unlike a Junior Dev, the AI will not remember what you taught it. You aren't working with the training weights. You, as an AI user, are JUST a user. A Junior will grow as you train them. A tree given water and sunlight. Eventually, as you grow old and decrepit, a fossil with no reason to be brought back to life, the Junior will become a Senior and blame you for ruining the codebase-
Back on topic, so AI is useful for helping a developer that knows what they are doing.
But what if you don't know what you're doing?
Play that music for as long as you'd like while reading.
Vibe Coding
There's nothing more horrifying than watching an AI construct code from nothing, being prompted to fix a problem, and then re-writing half of the entire codebase while also not fixing the problem.
This is no Junior Developer. They are too scared to touch code that they have not been explicitly told to touch. I leave a comment for my juniors at the top of the files I think they'll need.
// This one is for you Tommy
For those of you not in the know, Vibe Coding was this term that suddenly popped up in programming circles and has since reached escape velocity. The entire thing is, you set up an AI with access to a portion of your filesystem or just your entire codebase, you prompt it with what you want, and no matter what it spits out, you just hit accept. Every single time. Don't bother asking, don't parse, don't double check that it's not breaking your carefully constructed feature. Accept what the AI does, sit back, and relax.
When I say it has reached escape velocity, what I mean is people are using vibe coding in GAME DEVELOPMENT. That's where this originated too. One of the shittiest games I have ever seen, but it charged people an upfront fee to play. And since the creator had a strong and avid following and could market very well, the game sold hotcakes. No steam means no 30% cut either. As you can imagine, when the sharks smell money, they come swimming for profits.
Since AI cannot synthisize new solutions or make connections outside of its training, all it can do is paste code that its seen, not giving a fuck about the context of that code. Code can be written 1000 different ways. I can show you a web page without a single forloop, but then I'd get fired from my job, get my house burned down, and blacklisted from my contacts. AI will take that demon-spawn code and slap it in because it would technically solve the problem.
Whether the code runs or not is a problem for the developer to solve. And the Vibe Code way to deal with this is to just copy the error and paste it in the AI, then go back to watching Netflix. Rinse and Repeat, wasting money on tokens 30 times over until finally something works and you move on, uncaring that if the player double taps a button on the UI, the camera flips upside down.
I hold my hands over my eyes and peek through my fingers when I watch someone who obviously couldn't console.log their way out of a paper bag, slapping Cursor on their project and letting it commit coding war crimes. Of course they can't use git, so all of this just-
Oh man.
A Breakthrough
So what I thought would happen was that recursive thinking feature from a year ago or so right? The AI will ask itself, "Hey, is this fucked?" and it will reply to itself, "Oh yeah, it is lol". When it spends 5x as long to double-check if it's crazy, AI tends to output higher quality responses.
But as of right now, that doesn't seem to make a dent in the fact that, fundementally, AI just is NOT ready to act like a Junior Dev yet. The horror of this entire thing comes in when a C-Suite Exec sees their son Vibe Coding the shittiest piece of software that the world has ever known, comes to work and says, "Why the fuck are we hiring developers lol?"
And you'd think that was a joke, but Shopify CEO, Tobi Lütke, told his team that they had to prove a job couldn't be done with AI before asking for more people to be hired.
Imagine being one of these poor sacks of shit. A developer that has to beg and plead, on their knees, for the company to stop pushing AI like it's going to fucking save them.
I feel like stuff like this only blackpills people on the thought of working for companies more, but what choice do they have? If there's a drop on their number chart, the entire business collapses. Being steady and crusing along, content to not chase profits, isn't the way to succeed in business.
But despite knowing that, I still feel sick reading this because once again, AI isn't that useful. Not yet. All of this shit before then is just ruining the process of coding. AI also ruins our ability to think but that's a different discussion for a different day.
Ignore the 10x Dev
You're always going to run into this type of developer who not only takes great pride in what they do, but they try to shame you if you don't have the same amount of pride that they do. For these people, being a developer is their calling, the only thing in their lives that they truly care about or are good at. The 10x Developer will go on and on about how good AI is, but like I said above, AI is good because they know what they are doing.
If you are Junior, or honestly, even Mid-Level, I highly advise against using AI. What seperates a Senior Dev from everyone else is their ability to make a problem and solve that problem without help from anyone else. That only comes from experience. The struggle is what makes you learn.
Don't do it the 10x Developer way. That's stupid, you have a family to feed, hobbies to engage in, friends to talk to, and a life to live. 85 on this planet and over 25 are already gone. Do you really want to sit here groveling to be a 10x Developer? There's too much more to life than that buddy.
It's okay if you don't want to understand C because you work a React job. It's okay if you don't really understand the underlying logic of a forLoop. It's okay if you don't want to practice the tenants of clean-code.
And it's also okay if you don't want to learn AI. By time AI is ready to take your job, you'll know it. And hopefully by then, you'll have a healthy retirement saved up, and you can relax on a beach, sipping whatever the fuck you sip on a beach, and code fun projects that make sense. Work that muscle, not because the Shopify CEO wants 10x Devs and an army of AI arms attatched to their joints, but because making shit is fun.
Art, Coding, Learning in general is fucking fun.
There's a Joy in Creation, and AI saps all of the life out of it. The horror is real, and the pool of people who understand what they are seeing is very small. No one is willing to listen. You alone can't stem the tide. AI is here to stay and it won't get good until the bubble pops.
Take your time, don't panic, don't feel dread.
And don't fucking Vibe Code.
Take it easy~ | Luther✌🏿
